Destroying businesses without raising any revenue is awesome, so long as nobody gets to have a yacht. Of course, high luxury taxes won’t deter the hyper-rich from living large, only make more stark the divide between the merely well-off and the ludicrously wealthy. So even if you’re trying to decrease envy-related unhappiness, it’s not clear […]

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Per Atrios, I can’t shed many tears for Mitt Romney when people start highlighting some of the more unusual aspects of Mormon theology. I don’t think you get to say: “It’s vital, and crucially relevant to my qualifications for office, that I have a powerful set of guiding convictions… but never mind the actual contents […]

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I’ve got a piece about Boumediene v. Bush, argued last week before the Supreme Court, over at Reason’s Web site.

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Apparently, I’m in a textbook. Weird.

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The BBC reports on intriguing new research positing, on the basis of DNA evidence, that human evolution has sped up dramatically—perhaps by a factor of 100—over the last 5,000 years. The study authors offer growing population size as a possible explanation. This makes some intuitive sense: More organisms mean more opportunities for new genetic variations […]

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Therefore, a politician must be able to strike fear into their hearts. I shall become… Ron Paul! Well, that’s how it could have happened, anyway. Ron Paul tells ComixMix that his favorite superhero is the “Berlin Batman,” aka “Baruch Wayne,” from an Elseworlds story by the awesome Paul Pope. In a tale now notorious among […]

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Mike Masnick at TechDirt bags on writer Doris Lessing for some recent comments about the pernicious effect of the Internet and blogging: We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, […]

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While you’re waiting for the new Magnetic Fields album, watch Stephin Merritt write a song for NPR’s Project Song. Once you’ve done enough gazing-in-awe, you can download an MP3 of the song alone here.

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It recently occurred to me, while playing some Soul Coughing for a friend who’d been on a weird music hiatus during the late 90s, that many of the band’s best tracks are currently either totally impossible to (legally) get hold of, or scattered across various soundtracks. Notwithstanding the much-appreciated inclusion of “Buddha Rhubarb Butter” and […]

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Brian Doherty finds a hilarious compilation. Seriously, I lost track of the number of times I laughed out loud. I think this might be amusing even for non–comics geeks, but if (like me) you recall with a kind of stunned incredulity the insane period in the 90s when this guy was considered one of the […]

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